(Steven clarified what his last e-mail meant so that I could answer it.
Thanks Steven.)
On Mon, 8 Feb 2010, Steven Faulkner wrote:
> > >
> > >It's not clear to me what advantage there would be to just having
> > >lots of quotes
>
> I didn't suggest having 'lots of quotes' I suggested in this case it may
> be useful to include a quote from the UAAG spec.
As I see it this would mean having to chose between the following options:
1. Being consistent and switching to a style where whenever there exists a
document that already says something that we want to say, we quote it
instead of saying it in our own way, or
2. Being inconsistent and only having a quote here, not any of the
hundreds of other analogous places where there exists a document with the
same advice as the spec and where the same arguments could be applied.
Now since being inconsistent is, well, inconsistent, as well as being
illogical, I assumed you weren't proposing that. As far as I can tell,
that leaves option 1, in which we have lots of quotes. I explained why I
didn't think that was wise in a previous e-mail, but to make the point in
a possibly blunter fashion, consider this: the WHATWG spec says everything
the W3C HTML5 spec says. Does that mean we should replace the W3C HTML5
spec with simply a quote of the entire WHATWG spec? If not, what is the
difference between that, and what you're proposing? I don't see that
there's anything any more special about the UAAG document than the WHATWG
document, so why the difference in argument?
> I support matts original proposal i.e. to strike the text from the spec.
I understand that. I do not. I believe I've stated my case for why I have
reached this conclusion: an argument based on what is more likely to
result in accessible browsers (backed up by unsolicited support from one
of the browser vendor engineers who I thought most likely to actually go
out of his way to follow links!), and an argument based on the logical
conclusion of such an editorial policy (as described above).
Could you state your case? I presume it is not simply an arbitrary opinion
or a something silly like "well the UAAG is written by people who are more
expert than we are and so we should defer to them". After all, there is
ample UA accessibility expertise in this working group -- we are even
required by charter to have multiple UA vendors involved! So why should we
quote the UAAG rather than including any relevant advice inline?
--
Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'